Count me in on Xeni's side on this one, in principle, if not in presentation. I'm increasingly convinced that the "free culture" movement could, and should, be revolutionary in its implications - it's maybe the best thing to hit the left in the last twenty years, if the left will only wake up to it. Which isn't to say that the Soviet riff makes good political sense - but free culture is, and should be revolutionary. In other words, it should be all-American in exactly the same sense as Eugene Debs, Joe Hill and Woodie Guthrie were all-American.

You're out of your mind. If there's one thing Eugene Debs, Joe Hill, and Woody Guthrie had in common, it's that they weren't a bunch of artists playing at foreignness for a little hit of epater le bourgeois. They drew on self-consciously American and patriotic roots for the causes they championed.

There's a sensible argument to be made for emphasizing the "revolutionary" aspects of "free culture," but letting Bill Gates stuff us into the "communist" box is just retarded. Hipster irony is for losers.

News Flash... BoingBoing readership not solely composed of the irony-impaired... MPEG at eleven!

I think I see your point, but it does rely on a few premises that may prove to be false:

1) The majority of people who care about these issues are likely to see one of Xeni's parodies and be so outraged at the Red Menace that they will lobby their representatives to smite the godless CreativeCommunists.

2) The kind of people who are opposed to the Creative Commons are regular BoingBoing readers.

3) The word 'Communism' still has the power to chill people to their very core. Even in Bush II's America, is this still the case? Now, if Bill had compared intellectual property reformers to Liberals then maybe we should start worrying...

The word 'Communism' still has the power to chill people to their very core. Even in Bush II's America, is this still the case? Now, if Bill had compared intellectual property reformers to Liberals then maybe we should start worrying...

And yet, as Groklaw's regular updates on the business world's reporting of the SCO/IBM Linux case demonstrate, this sort of nonsense still gets regularly trotted out. Why do you think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institue gets grants to write their nonsense? It's to create a veneer of respectability for the idea that volunteer efforts competing against for-profit companies are somehow un-American. (This is, of course, why Benjamin Franklin's paid fire departments are still around, crushing the specter haunting our nation, the specter of community involvement.) Why cede that argument, even as a joke?

Why cede that argument, even as a joke?

Umm.. because if things are at the point where someone can't make a joke without their entire viewpoint being hopelessly devalued then they are so far from winning the argument that they may as well quit now?

I dunno. I am typing this in the offices of a cosy liberal NGO in London - are things really that insane, politically, on your side of the pond?

XJ is the reason I stopped reading BoingBoing; I just couldn't take her gobshite any more. That said, I am not sure she's doing more in those two posts you link than poking fun at Gates' blockheaded assertion.

Hi, Patrick! Longtime fan of your blog. Hey, I'm all for wrapping ourselves in american flags, and wholeheartedly support the Patriot Thong Movement for those who prefer to keep such sentiments on the downlow.

Seriously, though -- the BB posts you referenced were an (admittedly flawed) attempt at humor, which -- I'm sure you'd agree -- is a time-honored method for Sticking It To The Man. The notion that people who support copyright reform are "commies" is hilarious, and I think these little bloggable visual jokes are a perfectly appropriate and effective way to point out just how ridiculous that notion is.

And with that, fellow traveler, I thank you and bid you do svidaniya. --XJ

Somewhat offtopic:

This is, of course, why Benjamin Franklin's paid fire departments are still around, crushing the specter haunting our nation, the specter of community involvement.

I dunno about you, but I want professionals hauling my ass out of a burning building. Community fire brigades are wonderful (there's a strong tradition of same in Australia, where I'm from), but they're a supplement to, not a replacement for, the pros.

I'm more worried about the right er, "center" wing of the Democratic party right now than I am about the public. The last thing any movement in need of congressional support can afford right now is to be tagged Something We Have To Throw Over the Side as a Sop To The Red States.

I hope your return means you're feeling better.

Rush Limbaugh: And these communists, and friends i don't use that term lightly, they are out there stealing from American Businesses and what really gets me here is, they admit they're communists! They are proud of it! They are proud to associate themselves with one of the greatest enemies this country ever faced, a movement of the left that was based on the murder of millions of people, and if you think i am being somewhat over the top saying that these people are communists well you can go right here to see their logo, and their descriptions of themselves as communists.

Nope - I'm not out of my mind at all, far as I can tell. If you go back and look at my comment I'm saying that I agree with Xeni in principle and _not_ in presentation, and that I agree with you that the Soviet style presentation doesn't make good political sense. But it looked to me like your original post had two different arguments kind-of tangled up together in there. One is that presenting "free culture" as Soviet kitsch is a bad idea. I agree. The other is that presenting "free culture" as revolutionary is a bad idea. On this, I disagree. I guess what I'm saying is that a bit of leftwing revolutionary fervour seems to this expatriate Irishman to be as American, tasty and wholesome as apple pie. Mind you, as I've said before, my opinions on this are partly your fault anyway - I first started thinking about this stuff after having my mind quietly blown during that breakfast conversation in Toronto.

I'm not so much concerned about the idea that "the word 'Communism' still has the power to chill people to their very core" as I am about capitulating to the fraudulent proposition that our side are the aliens. It seems to be extraordinarily important that we keep spotlighting the fact that overweening IP tyranny is the new, different, foreign thing.

I realize that I risk looking humor-impaired by being so insistent about this, but look, politics is serious business and these stakes are real.

(I do also want to say that I am normally quite the fan of the sometimes-controversial Xeni Jardin.)

Henry: Fair enough. Yes, revolutionary fervor has a fine American pedigree. But it's very difficult to make that connection if we confuse matters by dabbling in Soviet imagery,

The ability of the bad guys to turn our hip, knowing, ironic humor about ourselves into a deadly weapon against us must never be underestimated. I remember when "politically correct" was a joke we told on ourselves.

I guess I have to disagree with you, too, Patrick. I don't have a very well thought-out support for how I feel about this, but I do think that the effect is not what you think it is. I wish I could be more articulate than that -- I just don't think that most people, seeing those images, will respond the way you think they will. Some will.

Patrick, that's a perfectly good argument. Perhaps you'd like this better, then.

http://oxy1.stsland.ru/lenin.jpg

:)

Contrast the BoingBoing parodies of Soviet propaganda with this classic of the genre.

Oy. First off, Bill Gates framing those who are pushing for more realistic IP laws as communists is not new. A few years ago, the BG had attempted to frame the open source operating system Linux (his main competitor for web servers) as "viral".

Second, I think the communist flag parody might actually be helpful in showing the absurdity of BG's frame. Sort of how my hermetic president cartoon pokes holes in the administration's "Criticism encourages our foes" attitude and their attempt to frame dissent as "aiding the enemy".

By itself, however, it does not create a new frame for IP that is progressive. I've contributed to open source projects, and found an interest in the legal aspects of how IP works. I wrote a long, rambling, article about it here:

drafting the gift domain

I wouldn't recommend anyone read through it end to end. It is in serious need of updating. There is some good stuff in it however. One nugget is my attempt to graphically represent the various intelletual property rights that are granted to authors and inventors and how they measure up to the "limit of public good".

limit of public good

yikes! talk about over reaction. the issues at hand are udoubtedly serious and worthy of earnest debate filled with the properly dour faces and gravitas, but c'mon. these things are a goof. an appropriate reaction to an extremely goofy statement. "good politics!? bad politics!?" geez.

One way to reframe gate's statement is this:
Overly protective intellectual property law
is little more than
corporate welfare.

"yikes! talk about over reaction. the issues at hand are udoubtedly serious and worthy of earnest debate filled with the properly dour faces and gravitas, but c'mon. these things are a goof. an appropriate reaction to an extremely goofy statement. 'good politics!? bad politics!?' geez."

Why yes, that is a pretty good job of condensing all the stupidest possible responses into a few lines.

The idea that I think we need "properly dour faces and gravitas" is just silly, and not born out by anything I've said here or anywhere else. The idea that something is immune to criticism if you make the magic hex sign and declare It Was A Joke is dumb coming out of the mouth of a twelve-year-old.

I may be right or wrong on the particulars of this discussion, but I'm not going to apologize to you for being "serious." Not for the first time, I'm reminded of R. A. Lafferty's remark: "The opposite of 'serious' isn't 'funny.' The opposite of both 'serious' and 'funny' is 'sordid.'"

Henry, Xeni: Right idea, wrong revolution. Think Boston Tea Party, or maybe the Gadsden Flag and its ancestors. (Franklin's "Join or Die" cartoon reminds me of how BitTorrent chops up and rejoins files....)

I don't necessarily agree with Patrick's position, but I definitely see his point. While witty and amusing, a "creative commies" flag can all too easily be used against the cause of copyright reform as well as used for it.

However, I like the general copyleft flag idea far too much to abandon it, and think, perhaps, it should be extended instead. I'd like to see a whole set of flags/wallpapers/etc, that use the copyleft symbol in place of the original symbol. For example, I'd love to see a "copyleft & stripes" flag, which would definitely be in keeping with the concept that a relaxed intellectual property climate is an all-American value.

Now I feel all awkward 'n stuff for liking Soviet kitsch before it was cool, and being an open-source programmer shortly after it was cool, but not stopping when it was cool.

Patrick, it seems to me that you're overreacting by construing the open-source movement as necessarily political in nature in the first place. While I suppose it's possible (sweet Jesus, after the past few years I have to admit any idiocy is possible) for open-source to be declared as illegal and/or immoral, I simply have to imagine that this would be one more nail in America's coffin. If we're that g--d---- stupid, as my grandfather would have put it, we deserve Darwin to kick in.

But when companies other than Microsoft see themselves threatened in this way, I think they'll react. So the notion of "political stupidity" really doesn't factor in. And the Commie kitsch is great if you ask me. I'm a sucker for Soviet art. Always have been, always will be. So seeing more of it, associated with something I consider to be expression of the inevitable force of history, well, I go all goose-pimply, tovarishch.

I am sure that it is just coincidence that the first time I tried to look at the boing boing link, Internet Explorer informed me that I had lesnerized (or whatever it says) and it was shutting down in protest. It worked OK the second time.

wow.

thanks for applauding my ability of "condensing all the stupidest possible responses into a few lines." it's no easy task i'll tell you.

no need to apologize for being serious, ever. i agree. but for my part i can say the graphic i created this morning was in fact a lark. the response it's gotten, critical or approving, is fascinating to me. i've never been knee deep in a developing meme until now. it's a sordid business evidently.

hm, on further consideration, I think there is a fatal problem with the communist==copyleft flag satire from a framing point of view.

Satire is fine as long as you're casting the bad guys as bad. The Hermetic President pokes holes in the Administrations attitude that dissent is the same as "aiding the enemy" by showing it for what it is: bald-faced nationalism that could easily lead to facism. So framing Bush as Hitler has it's purpose.

The problem with the "copyleft == communist" satire is that it takes an inherent trait of intellectual ideas (that knowledge is community property) and casts it as evil (communism).

The natural state of intellectual works is that they are public domain.

The constitution allows congress to grant a limited set of rights to Authors and Inventors only to the extent that such a legally created and sanctioned monopoly "furthers the useful arts and sciences".

Taking the natural state of intellectual works (public domain) and casting it into the frame of evil communism and community property is exactly the frame that Microsoft and RIAA and MPAA want: that the natural state of ideas is "property".

The communist flag with the copyleft symbol fails to break the frame set by Gates. Rather it reinforces it.

Microsoft was convicted of anti trust violations during the Clinton administration. But it was dragged out long enough that Bush came into office and Ashcroft decided to drop the case. That Microsoft makes millions of dollars of campaign donations every year and got a political exemption from the law stinks to high heaven.

Corporate Welfare

At first I was confused by this post, I couldn't make out what the issue was, and then what the issue about the issue was. As I understand it, we're talking about how we want to position ourselves. The right has been extremely succesful at branding the left as unamerican, and they have managed to align their agenda with what's best for America.

The work done to broaden intellectual property laws and make them tighter and more restrictive is now being positioned as protecting America, and it's opponents are anti-business commies who hate freedom. A blogger found this position absurd, and in mock made a commie like flag icon and put it on her site. Patrick suggested that this is precisely the wrong reaction, as it will only strengthen the accusations already made.

I know you all already knew this, but for anyone who may have been as ill-informed as I, this is my attempt to save you the work of figuring it out. If I got it wrong, anyone feel free to correct me.

That said, I get it Patrick's point. We need to show that we are the real patriots, that we support a view of IP that actually favors more people trading information, making money, and doing brisk business in a free-marketplace of ideas. Bill Gates is trying to wrangle big government into destroying the free market, with his monopolistic tactics that reek of favoritism from government cronies. The next thing you know, he'll be charging us to think and sending in the government to collect a Microsoft tax on our every email.

I'm going to keep returnign to this discussion until I can figure out how to say the thing that is bothering me, because it is really really important and it has to do with why we're embattled instead of triumphant right now.

I know very well, Patrick, because I've been reading things you've written for a long time, that you have no intention of advocating a cramped, joyless, fearful and tongue-tied opposition. But I do think that the result of being afraid of communism jokes and defiant and ironic humor will be that. Actually, I believe this is one of the two or three things I know for sure. When we're outspoken, and we offend a few people, and we glory in ourselves, we win. When we hedge, and mumble, and worry more about offending than about getting our say, we lose.

Oh, I think I did it. I think this is what I want to say.

Anyway, I think those things are pretty in their own right, and I would like to point out that the esthetic in question was prevalent all over the world at the time, crossing political, cultural, and geographical lines -- not that that has anything to do with the argument, but it seems like it should be said now and then.

I agree, to a point. I think this is probably a not a good time for irony, and this too serious to laugh off. Gates is a powerful man, and them's fightin' words.

I actually liked the "creative commies" images as a goof, but I see Patrick's point.

One could just as easily make the case that centralized control over information (ie, the IP regime that Big Media favors) has echos of communism.

Perhaps someone could gin up some art around that theme.

Maybe a more constructive way for us to look at this is to recognise that we aren't limited to either making fun Bill Gates' remarks or reframing the debate. We can do both and, to be honest, I think we need to do both.

The right have got a lot of mileage out of mocking political correctness, while at the same time depicting it as ideologically unsound and even dangerous. Can't the copyfighters use the same two pronged attack?

I like the flag with the wings.

Sennoma, I haven't had a fire, but the local volunteer EMTs come get me once a year or so, and not only are they good, but one of them can get an IV in my arm in the first try.

I love the creative Commies meme. It makes fun of the Man. Nobody thinks open-source programmers are going to send Polish Army officers to the Gulag, send tanks into Prague, or bug the American Embassy in Moscow. By reveling in it, we demonstrate that this frame has no power over us: cf "Yankee Doodle Dandy".

Making fun of the frame is an excellent way to disable it entirely. Or so I hope. Because I still like Commie kitsch (my wife makes fun of me, but she still took me to the statue museum in Budapest so I could visit my favorite statue after it disappeared from the Hero's Square.) (Disclaimer: I'm a Communist sympathizer, having married one.)

I find good reason to pay attention to both Patrick and Xeni, who may share some common ground. I also believe that this article is relevant:

"Who Owns the Media?" by Simeon Djankov, Caralee McLiesh, Tatiana Nonova, and Andrei Shleifer, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. XLVI (Oct 2003) pp.341-381.

I won't post the 5-sentence abstract unless Patrick agrees that this might be germane to this thread.

Not for the first time, I say: I'm not really worried about the "communist" aspect.

I'm a lot more worried about "our side"'s quick willingness to accept being labelled as alien.

I share Lucy Kemnitzer's belief that "when we're outspoken, and we offend a few people, and we glory in ourselves, we win. When we hedge, and mumble, and worry more about offending than about getting our say, we lose." However, being outspoken and being willing to offend a few people, while necessary, isn't sufficient. Thinking for two or three seconds about who it is we need to convince, and what might work to convince them, is also needed.

Or, we could just exchange t-shirts to tell one another how much cooler than Microsoft we are. That's a plan, I suppose.

With all respect to folks still determined to wrap themselves in the flag - or at least claim, in some way, the patriotic high ground - I have given up on the idea that "our side" is not alien. I do not want to continue in apologizing for what I think, or in finding ways to frame it as harmless to the majority view. I suppose this applies equally to my dislike for strong IP law and my contempt for the values of many social conservatives.

Oh, cripes. Sorry for the fire-related tangent, but here's Steve:

(This is, of course, why Benjamin Franklin's paid fire departments are still around, crushing the specter haunting our nation, the specter of community involvement.)

Um, no. Ben Franklin's brand of fire insurance worked on the principle that if your building displayed a paid-for "fire mark," certain fire companies (which were paid for this service by the insurance company) would try to put out fires on the premises. No fire mark, no service.

Modern fire departments put out any blaze they can reach. The only thing "paid" about 'em is that career firefighters are, mysteriously, paid for their efforts. For sitting around in long on-call shifts, at all hours of the day and night, in all kinds of weather, waiting to hop to it if someone needs help.*

The bastards. Anti-community service provocateurs, the lot of 'em.

And then there's Sennoma:

I dunno about you, but I want professionals hauling my ass out of a burning building. Community fire brigades are wonderful (there's a strong tradition of same in Australia, where I'm from), but they're a supplement to, not a replacement for, the pros.

Look, I know you didn't mean much by this. And I know this crack about "professionals" seems like a pretty glib and obvious thing to say. But the fact is that there really is no such thing as an "amateur" firefighter, at least in the United States-- volunteers and on-calls train to the same standards, and use the same equipment, as the career folks. If someone dressed as a firefighter is pulling your ass out of a burning building, that person has trained for many hundreds if not thousands of hours against the same requirements set down for career fire fighters, even if they're a volunteer.

The vast majority of emergency services personnel in the United States are part-timers, volunteers, and on-calls. According to my class materials, 88% of the fire departments in the U.S. are all-volunteer or mostly volunteer-- and just 6% are entirely composed of career fire fighters. About one-quarter of the million or so currently active U.S. firefighters are career; those folks are also very heavily concentrated in major urban centers.

Even when career fire fighters go on a call, chances are they'll have support nearby (or at hand-- seven different departments responded to a recent building explosion in St. Paul, for example, and half a dozen got together to help out with the hideous cat-hoarding mess reported in Teresa's blog a few months ago) from part-timers. Part-timers drive the engines, maintain the quipment, run the ambulances, haul the patients, man the radios, and man the hoses just as vigorously as careerists do.

So it's a little bit ass-backwards to say "they're a supplement to and not a replacement for the pros." Fact is, in most places, career emergency personnel are a supplement to the volunteers. Fact is, they all train to the same standards, and they are all professionals of a sort, and they are often on a scene side by side.

I start my training as a fire fighter in four days. My class material is on my brain. I don't mean to snap at you, but nowhere in my syllabus does it say that those of us with volunteer service as an eventual goal get to slack off.

---

*Asterisk! Part-timers and on-calls tend to get some measure of compensation on an hour-by-hour basis, when responding to calls and for certain compulsory training events. This varies from location to location. In the city I was living in, it was $8.88 an hour for on-call firefighters and paramedics. Note that that's not money for sitting around waiting for one's pager to go off; that's what you start to accrue only when you run out the door and zip over to the station to do some work.

"Thinking for two or three seconds about who it is we need to convince, and what might work to convince them, is also needed."

That's also being done. There are more serious, reasoned articles on the subject. If what I've been calling "information socialism" for decades has yet to see its Adam Smith, this may be because it information socialism is still very new, and Smith was after all writing a century or two after the birth of industrial capitalism.

Turning to persuasion, it seems to me that what won the case for industrialism capitalism finally was not so much persuasion. Rather: (1) industrial production was enormously more efficient than craft production, and (2) industrial production could turn out better weapons, faster and cheaper. Industrial capitalism persuaded, finally, not by rhetoric but by power. Indeed, it could not and still has not won the rhetorical war. And so I think it will be with information socialism.

(I would be most unhappy if this is taken as advocacy of cyberwar. As I hope most of you know, I hate war.)

Seems to me that if the Creative Commons movement is being attacked as communist, then the imagery they want to wrap themselves in is that of the Samizdat writers in the USSR - uncopyrighted, unofficial, no named owner, and risking their freedom to take on the oppressor.

It's funny, in the whole copyleft=communism debate there's been a lot of 'CC is communist," "No, extreme copyright is communist!" But the fact is that neither are particularily communistic. Many of copyleft's advocates have an anti-corporate agenda, but many others believe in copyright reform because they support the rights of entrepreneurs to enter the market with new products without the say-so of the incumbents; that's not communist, it's practically libertarian.

But neither is copyright maximalism communist (in the USSR, the state held all the copyright and made certain works available without compensating their authors, and suppressed other works by claiming the exclusive right to reproduce them).

Copyright maximalism is *feudal* -- it is the descendant of the old system where the Roi would grant a favoured courtier the exlusive right to produce silver thread, or silk ribbons, or pipe organs.

It's the specific evil that the US Constitution's framers had in mind when they wrote the "limited times" and "to promote the useful arts and sciences" language into the Copyright Clause.

I think one of the reasons the neo-cons won is that they are deadly serious (in all senses of the word deadly) and frame all their arguments in absolutes. "Commies" is an absolute. And so to, for them, "Democracy." And "Faith."

Whereas we are serious, but not deadly, and also seriously playful and seriously able to laugh at ourselves. Which mitigates our ability to be as deadly as the other side.

However, that being said, I also have to point out that I hate getting aligned with Bill Gates on copyright issues. But as a creator, I am constantly reminding folks that I have to eat, pay mortgages, and leave something to the children and grandkids, too. My stuff AIN'T free. (Another one of my poems has just turned up sans copyright info on a website--this one for scrapbookers! So I may be a tad cranky this early morning.)

Hm, just went back to the original article that start this whole thing. Communism is the least of the problem. First of all, the guy doing the interview is corporate shill or a framing idiot.

> Q: In recent years, there's been a lot of
> people clamoring to reform and restrict
> intellectual-property rights.

Using the word "rights" for most readers will probably invoke the idea of "human rights" not "all rights reserved", therefore, any "attempt to restrict IP rights" is equivalent to restricting "human rights".

And "clamoring" makes it sound like we're a bunch of rabble rousers with nothing but trouble. I'm not "clamoring", I'm reasoning.

A better way to frame the question might be:

Q: More and more people have been demanding that intellectual property laws be rolled back to their original intent. The founding fathers made the first copyright last 30 years, now it lasts 130. The Supreme Court has continually expanded Fair Use over the last 200 years, but with the "anti-circumention" clause of the DMCA, Fair Use can be locked out by technological measures. End User License Agreements are being used to foist additional restrictions above and beyond what copyright extends to the author. Software couldn't be patented until 1980's and now software patents are being used to monopolize the most mundane thing as "one-click" shopping with a mouse and a webbrowser. What say you on this, Mr. Gates?

> A: There are some new modern-day sort
> of communists who want to get rid of the
> incentive for musicians and moviemakers and
> software makers under various guises. They
> don't think that those incentives should exist.

That's the perfect frame for BG. Lump all Intellectual Property reformists into the "they don't want copyright at all" category.

"Communists" is not the fram doing the damage here, its that we're being lumped into the "they don't want any copyright laws at all" group of crazies.

"communists" is just a distraction to bait IP reformists to attack the "red menace" label and ignore his real frame. IP law has its benefits and I'm not for wiping it out completely. It's just that it's become the new version of the Railroad monopolies around 1900. Too much power has been legislated to a few people.

I generally find BoingBoing to be a good source of interesting links.... but sometimes, I want to reach into the screen and throttle Cory Doctorow for overreacting.

Jane, the extreme monopolistic Disney-style modern copyright being pushed by large corporations doesn't assure your right to benefit from your work -- the old-fashioned copyrught was supposed to do that. This new, radically different, construction of copyright does a raft of unpleasant things.

One, it consolidates yet more money and power into yet fewer hands -- because these few hands inherit copyright from "their" artists, if they don't wrest it from them while they're living. Another, once an artist has died, it is very likely that works will die which once would have been preserved by reprinting by enthusiasts, or which new modern technology has given a chance to be preserved in ways that they haven't before(like Schwambrania*, or What is to be done? -- either of the books by that name -- or the records of Waide Mainer and His Skillet Lickers or Cow Cow Harris or the films of Ub Iwerks) -- because the only people who are allowed to reprint are people who have no interest in preserving, only in getting out timely, highly profitable works.

Another thing it does is it shackles scholars, artists, reviewers -- because "fair use" has just about gone out the window. Even in the scientific fields, where quotation is absolutely necesary, people have been served notice that they have to pay for the use of even a sentence. Scholars aren't, in the new regime, allowed to quote stanzas. Nor are reviewers.

And dog help you if you're an artist who wants to reference something in a story, or use an image in the corner of a painting. This is how absurd it is: the administration of Fallingwater asked a Sims fan to abandon a project of reproducing some of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright in false-perspective 256-color 300-pixel wide pictures to freely share with people for use in computerized doll houses. In the name of protecting their copyright.

Making a living through copyright doesn't mean we need the current form of copyright. Me, I'm a copyright conservative: I think the Founders original notion was pretty good, and I would happily go back to it if that was the only alternative.

I think the copyright debate should be framed in two terms: Short copyrights are conservative and American; longer copyrights are radical and greedy. Being able to choose your own copyright license is a matter of liberty.

I agree with Patrick on this issue. The commie-artists flags/icons are not funny, imo.

The only truth behind the "commie" frame Gates is invoking is that he is trying to be an imperial Tsar here; to GWB's King George.

I agree with Cory Doctorow, historically and legally. I agree with mayakda's historical analogy on Bill Gate$. I agree with Will Shetterly very much that "Being able to choose your own copyright license is a matter of liberty." I analogize that to Timothy Leary's statement that being able to choose your state of consciousness is the most basic matter of liberty; in this case, the issue devolves on the interface between your consciousness and that of your readers. I agree with Lucy Kemnitzer that "it shackles scholars, artists, reviewers -- because 'fair use' has just about gone out the window. Even in the scientific fields, where quotation is absolutely necesary, people have been served notice that they have to pay for the use of even a sentence. Scholars aren't, in the new regime, allowed to quote stanzas. Nor are reviewers," although the border between what can and cannot be cited in a review or scholarly paper (as a function of length) is somewhat fuzzier than the bright line she suggests. I thank Patrick for moderating this extremely important thread, which goes to the very heart of what scholars, authors, scientists, and hyperpublishers do as a way of life.

Um, no. Ben Franklin's brand of fire insurance worked on the principle that if your building displayed a paid-for "fire mark," certain fire companies (which were paid for this service by the insurance company) would try to put out fires on the premises. No fire mark, no service.

Right, which is the point I was trying to make, thus the oppositional of community involvement (by which I meant both volunteer F.D.s and the modern professional model). "Paid fire fighters" was not the way to phrase it, however. Bad humor on my part, but I think bad humor leading to potential misunderstanding

This discussion reminds me of the people at Downhill Battle, who I think I generally agree with but whose rhetoric I find dangerously bad; their whole "let's blow up the RIAA" stance is dandy from the point of view of someone who would pay to hear Shellac put "The Problem with Music" to music but seems very unlikely to convince the vast number of people who are ignorant of the argument altogether; Jenny Toomey's the Future of Music Coalition doesn't have quite the same policy goals, but I think stating your question as "how can fix the system while making sure musicians can still earn a living?" is more likely to get results. Nobody is sympathetic to record executives, but nobody likes college kids downloading Ludacris singles either. Such is life.

Not to delve too deeply into Boing Boing Kremlinology, but I think the sites ongoing discussion of "This Land is My Land" copyright last year would have been a useful piece of meme-chucking: those grasping bastards are trying to put the screws to some poor schmuck animator, even though Woody Guthrie explicitly invited them to! Seize on the tactics used by the people pushing tort reform -- where there are real abuses, inflate them mercilessly, turn them into jokes, and make sure everyone knows about them. (Doing this with the RIAA's suit against 14-year-olds and computer illiterate grandmothers would work, I think.) When there are real substantive questions where the opposition has a point, steer them back to the caricature you've set up in step one. At no point has the tort reform lobby made amusing drawings of themselves as sinister puppetmasters pulling the strings of the Bush administration while killing off children and pets with lousy products, even though I'm sure you can find some rhetoric out there that defines them as such.

(Sorry for being longwinded, Patrick.)

T-shirts with ironic communist iconography have been common for years. I own & wear several of them. Having one with the CC logo on it isn't going to make anyone think for a second that CC people are actually communists. It's an in-joke.

Jacob: When you make an in joke, those who are out group aren't going to get it. Thats the whole point. They are instead going to be interpreting it through their own filters, and in this case, one of those filters is that that they hate you, and want everyone else to do likewise.

And wrt the communist iconagraphy, I know for a certain fact that their are people out there who will interpret it as revelatory of your true nature and motives and never, ever let it go. The phrase "piles of skulls" will rapidly and begin to figure in your life.

As far as ironic t-shirts goes, I'd like one that says "Hipster irony is for losers." Would people perceive it as ironic, do you think?

I had a more serious comment but it seems so tiresome now. Look: positioning CC or copyleft as an un-American (for that's the only important definition of "communism" in the public mind) revolutionary movement risks branding it as, well, un-American, and revolutionary. It's neither. So stop.

Oh, I forgot to say: I don't know where Planet BoingBoing is, but I'm fairly certain that I'm not cool enough to go, and if I did go, it would profoundly frighten me.

I must add that I love the look of the copyleft symbol with wings. Put that on a blue, green, or black background, and you've got a great bit of design that only the people you'll never reach would object to.

Seriously suggesting that people should limit what kind of in-joke T-shirts they wear because someone, somewhere might recognize the Creative Commons logo AND have a virulent and insane hatred of communism AND also have some influence on intellectual property law is stupid. And I say that with the utmost respect for pnh.

And I've worn my commie-esque T-shirts with not more than a laugh from others; I'm in the Bay Area, but so what? Should we be limiting our *clothing choices* to what might possibly offend someone, somewhere in the US?

I mean, I get the framing thing, I get the not-accidentally-associating-positive-ideas-with-negative-ones thing, but this is ridiculously petty.

Bad humor on my part, but I think bad humor leading to potential misunderstanding

Gotcha, Steve. No problem.

On one level, this is another version of the "Moral Fiction" panel we used to have at every 4th St. People who are doing art ought to be aware of the political/moral consequences of a given artwork.

If you're writing a book, which takes months or years, you have to be pretty naive/dense/unaware, if the notion of "how might this change the way people think", never enters your head. On the other hand, if you mull over every bit of repartee at the dinner table you're unlikely to be much of a conversationalist, and at least for me, trying to do that would destroy the "in the moment" enjoyment, which is most of the point of dinner conversation.

The people making the joke were in dinner conversation mode, and are at least somewhat rightly annoyed at being jerked into creating "ART" mode. On the other hand since it's on the web everyone can see it, forever. So worrying about the consequences isn't silly either. There has got to be a middle ground between looking over your shoulder all the time and playing into the hands of the enemy.

And mayakda, I don't think Patrick ever said the image wasn't funny. He said it wasn't wise. In fact, the funnier it is, the less wise it is.

Oh, and Alex Cohen, if you're not looking at BoingBoing, you are really missing something. Not everything's to my taste, but I see more neat stuff there than anywhere else on the web. Who doesn't love logic gates made out of lego? or flocks of colored mylar balloons mapping out the electromagnetic fields in the sky?

"But the fact is that neither [strong copyrights nor creative commons] are particularily communistic"

By definition, I'd think creative commons, based on sharing, at least might be communistic, while strong copyright, based on private property, is by definition not. I do wish more people would pay attention to definitions, here. I do, however, like your observation that the Framers idea of copyright was in fact a liberalization.

Ms. Yolen, Bill Gates is not on your side; rather he envisions a world in which most copyrights are held by Microsoft, and most art is work for hire. Consider also that copyrights in fact protect publishers, and what they offer to artists varies depending on the work and the medium; copyrights in music do little to protect the rights of artists.

As far as that red flag with the Copyleft symbol goes, it's the first I've ever heard of there being a copyleft symbol. Without the explanation, I'd have looked blank.

That may be what makes the flag a bad idea. Do enough people realise what the symbols mean.

On the other hand, the convention IP symbols for copyright and trademark and the rest would combine will with the symbolism of state communism. It would raide the image of the (godless) evil (corporate) empire, in which the powerful ruthlessly exploit the masses under the guise of some illusory doctrine of liberty.

If you're attacking, subvert the enemy's symbolism, not your own.

And my recollection of history is that America's boom as an industrial and commercial nation mostly came when the attitude of the US legal system to other countty's IP laws was more than a trifle cavalier.

Martin wrote:
> The people making the joke were in dinner
> conversation mode, and are at least somewhat
> rightly annoyed at being jerked into
> creating "ART" mode.

Personally, I'm not telling anyone its time to make "art". It's clear that the person behind the commie-artwork is sympathetic to IP reform. So am I.

But since I'm in a "dinner conversation" about IP law, why not take the oportunity to look at it and see why it does or does not work? If posting commie-kitsch is conversation, why can't this be considered part of teh conversation?

I don't understand why talking about it is such a fundamentally different conversation, unless "dinner conversation" requires no disagreements.

Did the commie-kitsch change anyone's mind about IP? probably not. Did it get people talking about IP to the point that it might change someone's mind? maybe. It's definitely got me to thinking about rewriting "Drafting the Gift Domain" with some new ideas.

It's part of the evolution of ideas, the chain of thoughts, in a series of threads and posts of a public conversation. So is this.

Scott Lynch: thanks for your reply. I stand corrected.

I was making a distinction between volunteer and paid firefighters that clearly doesn't exist in the US and, on reflection, almost certainly doesn't exist in Australia either. Or anywhere: you just can't *be* a firefighter on an "amateur" basis; no one would let you near the equipment or a fire unless you met the same requirements as the "pros". This is kind of a no-brainer really, which shows you how much thought went into my comment.

I apologize for any offence my ill-considered remarks may have caused.

/off-topic

All-American copyleft flag.

Malignant alien IP tyranny flag.

(I'm not as happy with the second one...)

What we need is for someone to figure out how to do the MPAA and RIAA as a takeoff on GOSPLAN.

Also: All-American copyleft T-shirt (etc.).

Er... and now the permissions are correct. Sorry.

All-American copyleft flag.

Bravo, David! Now what you need is a nice recording of the national anthem if the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1812 had existed.

I think the All-American copyleft flag might look better if it were derived more obviously from the Bennington ("'76") Flag. Perhaps a simple replacement of the "'76" with a copyleft symbol, leaving the thirteen stars in place.

Or perhaps the circle of stars "'76" flag, with a copyleft symbol inside the circle.

If we're going to stick with the communist iconography, we should just go all the way and call ourselves the Mensheviks. That should do wonders for morale.

I'd like to speak ex cathedra, bringing to bear my multiple years of experience as a magazine columnist covering the free software movement and as a full-time freelance writer who lives or dies by what he gets paid for the IP he creates, but I can already smell the rotten cabbages y'all are queueing up to throw at me, so I won't do that. Instead, I'm going to start with the executive summary, then explain my reasoning.

Executive summmary: Patrick is absolutely correct.

Longer version: The one thing that all those years covering free software taught me is that we are our own worst enemies. (I cite RMS and Eric Raymond as evidence. If these are the best spokesmen we can muster, we've got a problem.)

Talking about the free software/open source revolution backfires because ...

Most people get antsy and frightened when they hear the word "revolution". For good reason -- to them, a revolution means mobs on the streets, troops firing on crowds, looting, and secret police in the night. Or it means the entire industry you work in wakes up one morning to find it's obsolete and you're on the scrap-heap with no skills that'll get you a job any higher than filling shelves at Wal-Mart.

Most people are also suspicious (have been taught to be suspicious) of free software, because it sounds too good to be true, after decades of subtle propaganda put out by an industry which basically wouldn't exist if people stopped believing it was necessary. (Repeat after me: "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".)

When you start portraying yourselves as revolutionaries, you can expect massive push-back from the base who have been trained to assume that revolution is bad for them. And when your spokesmen look like wild mountain men with halitosis, you have an image problem. (What is to be done? Answers on the back of an envelope after the lecture, please ...)

Still, free software isn't what we're here for. So, getting back to the topic of the creative commons and copyright:

I could care less about copyright. What I care about, like Jane Yolen, is being paid. I don't much care whether the money comes in the form of royalties, a salary, or an ex gratia grant from some government agency tasked with fostering creativity by dropping money on the heads of writers who produce what people want to read: all I care about is the effect, not the mechanism.

The current copyright regime sucks (both the US one and its international cognate, as imposed via WIPO). I have absolutely no interest in retaining copyright 70 or 90 years after I'm dead; neither I nor any of my first-degree relatives will be the beneficiaries of it and in the event I have grandchildren I wouldn't want them to be living as rentiers anyway. All I want is to be paid and for people to read my books. This copyright regime doesn't serve the interests of creative individuals such as authors or composers or artists. It serves the interest of creative organizations who work on projects too big to succeed unless they can coordinate a team of creators. And it also serves the interests of any parasites who can interpose themselves between the public and the creators, and that is where the MPAA and RIAA and their friends like BMI and ASCAP slither into the frame.

These organizations have oodles of money to lobby and campaign with. They do not have our best interests at heart; in fact, they'd love to reduce all creative work to the level of work-for-hire (while owning the copyright themselves). Creating nothing themselves, they rely on perverting the efforts of others. Letting them paint us as wild-eyed radicals or foreign insurgents or hairy hippies or revolutionaries serves their purposes well, and we'd be idiots to take the poisoned bait. Patrick is dead right: while I appreciate Xeni's artwork as an ironic comment, it will backfire if deployed outside the core community.

We need respectable looking spokespeople, and we need to refrain from undermining them in public. Cory and Lawrence Lessig are a big step forward over the free software folks in socialization and knowledge of how to use a toothbrush, but we're up against folks who are hired for the sole purpose of looking good in public. And the court of public opinion is where this argument is going to be won or lost. Please let's not undermine our own campaign to be taken seriously before we get started?

Instead, we need to take the fight to the enemy. Paint them as copyright thieves, stealing the bread from the mouths of writers' and musicians' starving children. Paint them as copyright fascists, preventing you, the listener, from copying your CD's that you paid for onto your iPod. Paint them as the corporate blackmailers they are, threatening 12-year-olds with jail time.

But don't, please, let them portray us as elitist weirdos, or we've lost.

Charlie wrote: "I have absolutely no interest in retaining copyright 70 or 90 years after I'm dead; neither I nor any of my first-degree relatives will be the beneficiaries of it and in the event I have grandchildren I wouldn't want them to be living as rentiers anyway. All I want is to be paid and for people to read my books."

I agree I want to be paid in my lifetime, too, Charlie. But I am 65 and have children and grandchildren and want to--in effect--leave the family farm to them. Partially to supplement their meager incomes (they are writers, musicians, photographers after all!) and partially because Moms/Grandmoms want to give them something to be remembered by.

But also (for the shortish term) to have someone who will TEND that farm with dedication and understanding. I don't want MGM or Gates or Nickolodeon to seize my stories and make gadzillions off them after I am dead with no recompense to my heirs. If the Authors and Artists don't have any say in what happens to their work after they are gone, no legal voice, then the Bill Gates and their monied ilk get it all.

Jane

Sennoma wrote:

I apologize for any offence my ill-considered remarks may have caused.

No harm done. I can be more thoughtless than you with one hand tied behind my back and a broken keyboard, so don't worry about it. :)

I think something could blow up in my face if I said too much about the parasites between the creator and the public, but the music and movie businesses seem to be infested in ways that are less apparent in the area of books.

And it's music and movies, as digital media, which seem to be driving the whole sorry mess. Self-publishing in the book world is tainted by the vanity-press slime, but I don't hear anyone thinking that only big publishers can sell non-pirated books.

Look at movies and music, and the image is being created that nothing not from the big guys can ever be non-pirated. Even though it is easier than ever to record and duplicate an album. (Assuming you can play the instruments.)

Movies are still hard. They're bigger and more complicated and need a lot of people to work together. But the basic tech, such as digital video and the editing, is getting down to consumer level. Distribution is a bigger problem than for music.

It looks as if Copyright is being used to maintain near-monopolies on distribution. And the creative people are the last thing the RIAA and MPAA are thinking about.

Charlie Stross, my take on a reasonable maximum copyright period is life of the artist, plus five years. That's long enough to help the heirs immediately after your death and to ensure that no one decides to kill you to make a movie of your work more cheaply.

I do think you should have the option of shorter copyright periods.

Jane, an artist's heirs inevitably get three benefits: the artist's name, a life in the artist's family, and the investments the artist made while the work was under copyright. I have serious doubts about giving them more. I look at Professional Heirs out there like Christopher Tolkien and Majel Roddenberry, and I am not impressed and not convinced that's a good thing to do to a child you love.

A quote from an early 20th century Anglican church composer:

"Barabbas was a publisher." - T. Tertius Noble

To chime in with and gloss on Charlie Stross, another problem with posing as a revolution is that it places the burden of proof on you. "We're going to radically change things," you're saying, "and when we're done, we'll all eat strawberries and cream every day."

But most people don't want to change, so you're left with an enormous burden of proof.

The problem with this formulation for IP is that it is precisely the maximalists who are pushing for radical - aye, revolutionary - change. The burden of proof ought to be on them.

Here's the framing I'd suggest: We're conservatives. We want to turn the clock back before the 1970s, back to a time when good music and good literature were getting created (just like now), but without those pesky (dare I say frivolous?) IP-infringement lawsuits.

There is political wisdom in what Patrick has said here, and the thoughful agreement by Charles Stross underlies how extensive is the community of those who can agree.

As something of a first Amendment absolutist, I feel that the most insidious form of censorship is self-censorship. But sometimes that is the prudent path, for tactical and strategic reasons.

The Charles Stross comment on spokesmen is also valuable. With all due respect to Mr. Stallman and Mr. Raymond, whom I have known for quite a long time, an enthusistic spokesman with a message that boomerangs does not advance our common cause. I'm at the last day of a 3-day conference at Caltech: "Engineering a DNA World" and the plenary session on DNA Ethics had essentially unanimous agreement between keynote speakers that: (1) we must use language which is clear and consistent with a wider community, else we are merely alone in a room thinking that we're clever; (2) we must have good spokespersons, else not speak to The Press at all (they did not think that Eric Drexler and Bill Joy have been useful in recent years in explaining Nanatotechnology to laypersons); (3) We must go to kindred communities of professionals, respectfully, speaking their language, and ask them "what problems do you have with which we might be able to help you?"

I think that these same sociological principles apply to the intellectual property debate. Do we want our work effectively distributed, and to be fairly compensated for our work, to the benefit of our families and our society, or do we want to just be alone online and congratulating ourselves on how cute we are?

Will--we have had this disagreement before.

I'd like you to make that same argument to ANYONE with a family farm, a small family business, a family shop etc. Tell them that within five years of their mother/father's death, they will lose all rights to the business. Five years--and a stranger with money to spend on it (but not to give to you), will take over your farm or your family shop, whether you want to give it up or not. Tell them that the person who takes it over can then do anything they want to it--make it into a brothel or a place to launder money or a sweatshop or simply sell it to a big company that will build on the property without regard to its history.

(You can tell I get all fired up over this. My metaphors are hopping all over the damn place.)

Jane

Jane: you're right, of course. Will: you're right too.

The problem with unreasonable post-mortem copyright extensions is that they harm the public commonweal, while rapid rights reversion to the public domain harms private heirs. I'm trying to remember where I read the figures for works of literature that go out of print after their creator's death -- I think it was something like 95% of books, within 2-3 years -- and fail to be reprinted subsequently.

This doesn't help anyone: not authors' heirs, nor the reading public. So we need to find some way of striking a balance, don't we?

Assuming we don't want to ditch the whole idea of copyright (which would be really difficult to do, at this point), how's this for a proposal:

Copyright on an author's or artist's work should remain in force for their life plus ten years. At the end of that ten year period, the heirs to the literary/artistic estate should be able to petition for another ten year extension, on all the artist's copyrights, at minimal cost. (Ideally a simple registered letter to an appropriate library of record should be sufficient for the purpose.) One letter, one ten year extension, renewable as long as the heirs continue to express an interest in the creator's works.

Such a system would, I believe, get around the problem of orphan works that cannot be reprinted because no rights owner can be located, while allowing rights owners to continue to benefit from works of commercial utility. It doesn't suffer from the drawback of Lawrence Lessig's proposal, which got so many SFWAns up in arms by implicitly taxing creators on the number of copyright works they maintain (thus penalizing short story writers while benefiting of movie studios). It only kicks in after death, and the sole purpose is to weed out the dead wood.

Comments?

Charlie's screed pops up a symbolism that might work: RIAA, MPAA, etc., are unions, as that term is used by the right: greedy, corrupt, stomping on individual liberties. (Can you tell I've just seen the reprinted On the Waterfront? Fascinating how many more levels it has 50 years later, starting with a reviewer's comment that Kazan probably wanted a stoolie hero after having stooled to HUAC.) That's the wrong term to use, because unions are still needed; but it suggests a way to turn the tables.

My first reaction to his summary was "...he wants us to hire suits!" (Or worse, turn into them.) But two seconds later I remembered "Brown Shoes", which argues exactly the same point with all the love and clarity Sturgeon could muster. And that leads to "Clean for Gene!" (which I remember only in retrospect -- it wasn't until the deaths at Kent State that I started to pay attention -- but which now looks like it could have saved the US a lot of trouble (by driving Johnson out of office) if Daley and the ]SDS[ between them hadn't made the Democrats once again look like the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion).

What it boils down to is that frightened people won't look to reason (let alone cleverness or laughter); they'll look to the most effective-seeming savior -- sometimes even a savior for the next life (cf What's Wrong with Kansas(?)) if they've given up on this one. Dealing with them is a sort of inverse of diplomacy (defined as the art of saying "Nice Doggy!" while looking for a larger stick).

Alex: can we cast our version of "copyright reform" in the same terms as "tort reform" -- that what the corporations want is costing the rest of us money? (As in the semi-mythical cases claimed by the right, it's also costing service alternatives, but that's a harder sell, per the above and the desire for conformity: too many people \love/ loving \s\o\e\h\s\ \d\l\o the same that everyone else loves.)

Charlie's response to the Will/Jane split looks good (which probably means I'm overlooking something). (But not that Will's argument holds up extremes as examples, or that Jane is addressing art as well as economics, which entangles two sets of parameters.) I \generally/ feel that people should not be rentiers (and admit that I'm not on solid ground here, considering that some of my retirement support is an inheritance) -- but that's another argument that has been turned over by the Right: consider the number of people who believe they'd be affected by inheritance taxes, reflecting a similar level of disconnection from reality as the number of people who still believe in Saddam's WMD.

Jane, I'm always sorry when I hop your metaphors. Whenever the conversation arises while we're both in the room, we can state positions without feeling any need to convince the other, honest. I do understand that when kids and grandkids are as cute as yours, you want to give 'em everything you've got. But because I want to understand your position better, I have a question: if stories are the same as the family farm, should they be subject to inheritance taxes, and if so, how do you value them?

Charlie, that proposal sounds reasonable to me. I may be a copyright conservative, but I'm not an absolutist. But I would like that to be the most extreme option. If I decide to put my work in the public domain, I don't think someone with a family connection should be able to jerk it out again.

Hm. I'm not convinced that copyright should exist at all after the creator's death. It's there to provide an incentive to creators, right? How many creators keep creating after they die?

Avram: Are you saying that direct payment to the artist is the only form of incentive? Jane holds that creating works that her heirs can inherit is something she wants and values. I would say it is arguable that the value she finds in inheritability is part of her incentive to create.

Avram: Tupac Shakur has now released more albums post-mortem than pre-. Also, a certain author with the initials L R H.

Will--are you really that naive? Of course my works are subject to inheritance tax.(So are yours.) In fact, we have taken out a rather large insurance policy so the kids don't go broke once the Feds make an assessment of what my property will be worth ten years after my death . Because for at least ten years, the Feds can demonstrably claim that the various stories, poems, novels, essays will keep earning money and they will look at past success times 10, which of course is not useful since once I die, two thirds of the income stream dries right up. (One third being new writing, one third being lectures and teaching, one third being royalties and resales.)

So this is not an argument for argument's sake on the money. And it's certainly an important argument for me on the art side as well. In fact, my daughter is now my full time assistant so she knows everything about my business. She knows what I will allow and won't.

Not all writers make a living from their writing, and perhaps for many of them this is a moot point. But not for me. My little family farm is prosperous. My kids are all in the family business. And I suppose I take all this rather personally.

So I should shut up now.

Shut up, Jane.

Jane

Jane

I'm saying that after Jane's gone, she probably won't be doing much writing. I'm saying that the purpose of copyright is not to create sinecures for the author's heirs. I'm saying that people found ways to provide for their heirs long before copyright was invented, and would continue to do so if it were abolished or modified to end with (or even before) author's death.

I'm saying that the lives of most modern fantasy writers would not be easier if, say, Grimm's fairy tales and the Child ballads and the Matter of Britain were still under copyright.

I'm saying that copyright in a creative work is not a family farm, or a small business. It is copyright is a creative work. It is a form of monopoly, and it therefore has inherent coercive and anti-competitive aspects to it.

I'm saying that the world would be a (slightly) better place if anybody who wanted to could set work in, or draw upon, Middle Earth or Narnia or Orwell's Oceana rather than just the people who get the nod from the heirs.

In an ideal world -- one where I was world dictator -- I wouldn't simply tinker with copyright, or even abolish it outright: I'd go a whole lot further, and demand a complete re-think of the entire concept of intellectual property. IP is, in my opinion, a contradiction in terms: if I have an idea and I give it to you, I still have the same idea lodged in my head, I haven't somehow erased my awareness of it. Thus, any legal system which treats information the same way it treats tangible assets has a fundamental error at its heart.

(NB: to start my complete rethink I'd have to commission a panel of the worlds smartest philosophers to go back to basics and come up with a "common sense" definition of creativity. This would probably take some time. When I said "rethink", I wasn't talking about tinkering with the trappings ...)

But as I'm not world dictator so you can sleep soundly in your beds, knowing that the current broken system will continue to lumber and creak along, and the Mouse will wax fat upon us.

Jane, I am that naive, and I appreciate your answer. I don't have a clue how the feds handle the inheritance of stories. I want mine in the public domain when I die, if not sooner, though I always thought it was kind of charming (and a very sad commentary on our economic system) that a kid's hospital benefits from Barrie's and the NAACP benefits from Dorothy Parker's.

Avram, I agree with you, but I don't think that's the way to win. I'd be content with copyright that lasted 28 years, as it was first conceived. I'm very admiring of the Creative Commons licensing. But many professional writers are terrified of our economic system, and they see strong copyright as the only way to keep their families out of the poorhouse after they die. If you want a lot of prosperous authors on board, I think you have to assure them that even though they won't be guaranteed health care or social security, they can choose to have a five or ten year grace period while copyright helps their heirs make new lives. And though I say it 99.99% in jest, I don't like thinking that if I had a breakout book, some studio could rush the movie into production if I happened to have a traffic accident on a rainy night.

I think the family farm analogy -- Jane Yolen made it here, but I've heard it from others too, notably Mary Gentle on rec.arts.sf.composition -- is a false one.

A farm -- unlike, under the present system, a copyright -- isn't a magic source of money. The kids who inherit the farm have to put some work into it; in fact, they have to put exactly the same work into it that their parents did, in order to make the same living. They can't just sit back and watch the money roll in. (Well, they can if the farm is profitable enough that they can afford to employ farmhands instead of working it themselves, but of course the parents were presumably in the same position, so it stops being a relevant analogy.)

In the absence of posthumous copyright, the writer's kids would be in the same position as the farmer's kids. They would inherit whatever property their parents owned, and they would be free, if they have the desire and talent, to make the same amount of money in the same business. The fact that there's a connection between the property and the business in the farmer's case, but not in the writer's, is a red herring.

Writers who want their kids to be able to make a living from their copyrights after they pass on are really asking that their kids be given an easier life than they had (and than the farmer's kids will). Which is an entirely understandable thing for parents to wish for their children, but not, I submit, a sensible basis for law.

Will Shetterly: "If you want a lot of prosperous authors on board, I think you have to assure them that even though they won't be guaranteed health care or social security, they can choose to have a five or ten year grace period while copyright helps their heirs make new lives."

Alternatively, of course, you could consider guaranteeing them health care and social security. Like, you know, every other country in the western world.

Why, yes, the NeoCons (for lack of a better descriptor) are trying to convince us of the truth of their belief that there is (or ought to be) no such thing as common (or community) property. Yosemite, National Forests, oil & mineral reserves, the ideas and stories that are in the hearts of many of us -- these should all belong to private individuals, to be used for their personal monetary profit. We have paid very little money (though some, and admittedly sometimes not enough) to the giants on whose shoulders we stand, and they paid little or nothing to those on whose shoulders they stood, all the way down. I don't think this system should be changed.

I just wrote a rather wordy thingamajig about exactly how intellectual property is different from traditional property, and it hit me, that right there is the biggest problem free culture people face, trying to explain this to people. The whole idea is really weird. And, if you look at it from the standpoint of someone used to physical property (i.e. basically everyone), deeply unnatural. "Wait a minute," they say. "You mean to tell me that you can duplicate the same thing an infinite number of times and not reduce its value?" "Um," I say. "Sort of. But in a way it does reduce its value, because its value is entirely dependent on its exclusivity!" "Huh." Suspicious squint.

The necessity of creating a physical medium to convey informational property has concealed this problem for a very long time. Now that's changing, and we need to come up with a clear, intuitive way of getting that across to people.

The assumption I see to the inheritance arguments (Pro and con), is that the inheritors are necessarily themselves grown up and able to make their own way without the inheritance. House-wives/husbands or three year old children, however, have a harder time if there's no insurance, or income, or fallback.

Now, I think any writer who's making enough money to support their spouse and children failing to have some kind of insurance or provision in those circumstances would be crazed -- but the occasional supplementary income to make things easier is always a bonus, and one anyone whose heir is a small child would want.

I also see in comments like Avram's and Ross's the implication that the creator of the works is NOT the best judge of what happens to the royalties that are generated after their death. This is true on the far extremes of both sides of the argument, of course, but it seems to be more prevalent on the side of those who want copyright to end at death or otherwise. I think the decision should lie with the creator, as with every inheritance.

Of all the suggestions I've heard so far other than Go back to the original version, or the bureaucratic nightmare that would be "let each individual person decide their own", Charlie Stross's sounds the best - except:

"One letter, one ten year extension, renewable as long as the heirs continue to express an interest in the creator's works."

Does this mean if the heir is a corporation (As per Barrie's Children's Hospital) instead of a person, they can continue to send that letter every ten years for the next 200 years? Or did you mean with a reasonable cap for corporate heirs?

Well, as for what we either had once, have or may in the near future have, I think I'm in the boat of copyright conservative (As defined, I believe by Will Shetterley): I heartily approve of the idea that copyright extends past the moment my life ends so that Will Shetterley's hypothetical "Movie of my book rushed into production on the day I get hit by a car" can't happen without someone I care about guiding the way.

I also heartily disapprove of having it extend to ridiculous lengths because corporate companies have put extensions on the original notion. Yick. No more logical argument than that presents itself right not but that everyone here has already heard.

On lighter notes:

Scott: " I can be more thoughtless than you with one hand tied behind my back and a broken keyboard"

If I had one hand tied behind my back and a broken keyboard, the things I would be saying would qualify at their kindest as "thoughtless". Especially if I was saying them to the perpetrator of the damage to my keyboard, and innocent witnesses were present to hear them.

CD: "Also, a certain author with the initials L R H."

Ack! I sign my casual e-mails by my full initials. It does strange things to my mind to see myself referred to as a writer who is both published and posthumous...

(Yes, I know you meant the thing that is Hubbard. Believe me, that is one association I would be most pleased to be rid of. Can't we change his first name to Xavier or Quentin?)

As usual, many thoughtful and intelligent points made in these comments.

But regarding the debate over whether Xeni and company should just shut up (that is how this started, isn't it?) it seems to me

(1) that this is the usual lefty infighting that renders us ineffective.

(2) that Patrick is at least as guilty of the rhetoric that keeps framing it as us versus them. In his post it's "the bad guys". Can't have it both ways.

(3) that if anybody seriously thinks that the framing of intellectual property issues will sway the electorate in the next presidential or congressional elections, they are ever more out of touch with average Americans. Fight the battle in the courts, fight it wherever you can, but when have you heard it in a campaign speech? Maybe I missed it...

(4) that you can wrap yourself as tightly in the flag as you like, but flag-wrapped vs flag-wrapped always favors the incumbents. Did it work for Kerry, the war hero?

(5) that some cartoons are better than others. But trying to ban some because you don't get the joke is foolish. Or try this analogy: Bill called us a name. Patrick's response would be "I know you are but what am I?" Xeni and others laughed, made a wisecrack, and got over it.

(6) that humor and irreverence in every form are intrinsic to our society and when we lose that the Orwellians of every stripe have truly won. (Cue obligatory response from this crowd on my misuse of an Orwell reference)

Welcome back Patrick.

And now we return to the exploration of intellectual property rights issues, in progress...

Lenora: I also see in comments like Avram's and Ross's the implication that the creator of the works is NOT the best judge of what happens to the royalties that are generated after their death.

In my experience, dead people tend not to be very good judges of much of anything that happens after they die. Also, if copyright doesn't last past death, then no royalties will be generated after death for anyone to judge what happens to.

Dave Pentecost, it's not a quest